Although she began her career as a poet, Alvarez is increasingly known for her novels, which treat immigration, alienation, heritage, and identity all in the context of family relations.
Alvarez's parents met in the United States, where her father ran a hospital and her mother was a student. Alvarez was born in the United States and was encouraged to identify herself as an American, but she spent her early years on her mother's family compound in the Dominican Republic. Along with her three sisters, Alvarez grew up surrounded by numerous cousins and was supervised by maids and the women of the family. As Alvarez once explained in American Scholar, her family's life changed when her father joined a group which planned to fight the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Though Alvarez's family on her mother's side had many American ties (her grandfather served as a cultural attaché to the United Nations), Alvarez's father was not safe from the dictator's police. Just before he was to be apprehended, a tip from an American agent prompted him to leave the country with his wife and daughters in a plane bound for the United States.
